On 11/21/18, Evan Reese <mentat1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I don’t think it is pessimistic to assess the world as it is. But two people_________________________________________________________________
can take the same set of facts, one feels hopeful, while the other sees
gloom and doom. Facts are facts, but people can have differing opinions
about what those facts portend for the future.
For example, one person can view all the actions of the Trump administration
and still be optimistic that the checks and balances of our constitution
will ultimately do their job, while another person can take the same facts
and be pessimistic that those checks and balances will hold up.
I’m not saying I am one or the other of those two examples. I just picked
the first thing to come to mind for illustration.
Evan
From: Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2018 3:20 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
But what good is optimism? It seems to me that we are better off assessing
the world as it actually is in order to act accordingly to get what we want.
That means that being realistic is advantageous over either optimism or
pessimism. But it also seems to me that any attempt to see the world
realistically is what you call negative or pessimistic.
Just clearing out old gmail, and couldn't resist answering a couple.
Isaac Asimov
“Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe in
telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life
after death?
No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.
One person recently, goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved
negation, burst out "Don't you believe in anything?"
Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement,
and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I'll believe anything, no
matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and
more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the
evidence will have to be.”
― Isaac Asimov
On 11/18/2018 6:14 PM, Evan Reese wrote:
Yes, genetics, which is horribly complicated, has to be a lot of the
source of our outlooks on life.
It seems that circumstances may be able to move that outlook perhaps a
little, but I’m doubtful that circumstances would, say, make someone who is
really pessimistic convert to raving optimism.
Now I have a book here called Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman,, who’s
a big wheel in the modern positive psychology movement, but I haven’t read
it yet. I imagine he has data on this subject that I haven’t heard about,
and obviously, from his title, he may disagree with me that people really
can learn to be optimistic. I’ll see what he says and then reevaluate if he
sounds convincing enough.
For now at least, it seems that people’s temperments are pretty set early
on in life, probably by genetics.
Evan
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 5:59 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
Not blindness, one’s individual experiences along with, I suppose,
biology. As a matter of fact, I’ve known many blind people who have an
extremely positive view of life and who do not feel that blindness has, in
any way, affected their life negatively. I remember one woman, I think it
was when I was getting the one guide dog I had, who was totally blind, who
told me vehemently that she had no wish to see and if doctors said that they
could restore her sight, she’d refuse because she was perfectly content as
she was and she didn’t believe she was missing anything. No, it isn’t
blindness. It’s the way that I, a person with partial vision, adjusted to my
situation. But different people adjust differently. I’ve met people with
approximately the same amount of sight as I had, who didn’t see as much as I
ddid because they didn’t use it as I did or because, perhaps, physically, it
was different. Actually, maybe it’s an inheritable trait. My older daughter
is pessimistic, more so than I, but not my younger daughter, whom we
adopted.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 5:40 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
Miriam, you are not paying attention.
I cannot now recall, (although I know it’s been several times at least),
that I’ve said that I do not ignore bad news.
Did I not say that I read most of what you post here? And the proof is in
the fact that I often respond to the stories you post here. I even posted a
bad news story myself, from the Economist, about Jamal Khashoggi's murder,
and how it looked as though it was bearing out my cynical prediction that it
would probably pass without much serious consequence to Saudi Arabia, or
MBS. I could certainly post more, and I may if I think it’s important; but
you’ve got the darkness angle pretty much covered.
So I vehemently reject the notion you seem to have that I look for only
positive stories, view the world through rose colored glasses. That is
demonstrably false, false, false! I’m not going to let you mischaracterize
my views in that way.
What I do in fact do is read both bad, and good, news. I actually read
more bad news than good, because it really is important to know what
problems exist so that we can know what they are in order to work to
mitigate them. However, I also do in fact look for good stories because I
think the notion that paying attention to only one side of a story is not
only mentally unhealthy, it is dangerous because it leads to, what can be, a
self fulfilling pessimism. I do not apologize for that.
And being blind has little or nothing to do with one’s optimism or
pessimism. I have been almost totally blind since birth, and I do not feel
that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Conversely, there are many
sighted people who feel as you do, and also many that feel, as I do, that
while we have many serious problems, that is not the same as believing that
we are doomed. I am not sure what ultimately causes people to have an either
glass half full or glass half empty outlook on life, but I am highly
doubtful that blindness is connected to it.
Evan
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 4:46 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Optimism, was Re: Would communism work with
computers?
I guess I want to respond to Evan’s underlying charge, that I have a
negative attitude, that I read only negative stories. One can, if one
chooses, ignore the bad stuff and look for positive stories, look at the
world through rose colored glasses. That’s a personal choice, similar to the
choice of having faith that God loves us and has a reason for everything.
For me, the signs of disaster are all around us and if we don’t heed them
and make our choices based on reality, we not only doom ourselves, we doom
succeeding generations. I imagine that my life experience has predetermined
me to view life in this way. As a visually impaired person, I had to, from
childhood on, understand the world in which I lived, plan ahead to be able
to function effectively in that world, and never underestimate the
obstacles. When I’ve been diverted from that manner of functioning, bad
things have resulted. So, while I support and applaud any honest efforts to
improve life for people, I’m cognizant of the dangers and difficulties. I
know that human nature includes the capacity to cooperate, to love, to
sacrifice for others, but it also includes the lust for power, and
aggression, and rage. Therefore, I don’t assume that human institutions are
benign. And I do think that we are now living in a very dangerous time in a
sick and corrupted society. Aside from news articles and books, I see the
problems in the everyday experiences of the people around me and in the
changes that I’ve encountered in my own life. The symptoms are people’s
distraction, forgetfulness, feelings of being under pressure, and the
impersonal nature of the interaction between people.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 4:10 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Evan,
I think it’s really nice that Amazon is increasing the wages of their
workers. I imagine that, probably, they might be increasing the hourly wage
to $15 for warehouse workers, if they’re lucky. One of those bad news
articles to which you refer, that I read the other day, said that if the
minimum wage were keeping up with our economy’s productivity and if it were
comparable to its value in 1970, it would be $25, I think that was the
amount. So if you had a family, a wife and one or two children, and wanted
to provide a relatively comfortable life for them, nothing fancy just
comfortable, could you do it on $15 an hour? I know that you read a lot and
you’re very intelligent. But I think that it’s all theoretical to you. I
don’t know if you have daily contact with real people who are living under
our present conditions.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 2:26 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Oh come Miriam.
I’ve read a lot of what you post here, and if that is any guide, and I
don’t see why it shouldn’t be, you spend most days consuming bad news. It’s
an unbalanced news diet. Just as someone who only consumes one kind of food
would not be expected to get proper nutrition, someone who only consumes one
kind of news is not likely to draw trustworthy conclusions.
We are not all screwed. Didn’t you, (perhaps in an unguarded moment), post
an article about how Amazon was increasing their wages?
And I am not talking about certain autocratic governments that ran what I
define as a planned economy. I am talking about certain autocratic
governments that ran what they themselves defined as a planned economy.
Evan
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2018 11:10 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
I actually have more to say on the subject because you originally said
that our economy works better than a planned economy. I don’t read The
Economist and therefore,I’m not thinking within the usual framework of how
mainstream economists think and write. But I’m familiar with it because I
hear it on the news. I certainly hear it on Marketplace on NPR which, by the
way is sponsored by, (yes I know supposedly there are no sponsors), the Koch
Brothers). When economists say that an economy is working well, they’re
talking about it working well for business, for the stock market, for
investors. We’re all supposed to assume that the rest of us will benefit.
But we don’t necessarily benefit. Production is up. Output is up. Profits
are up. But the workers don’t benefit, nor does the general public. The
profits are re-invested into the business but only in financial terms. Stock
holders profit. CEO’s profit. The business doesn’t improve working
conditions or service to its customers. Games are played with its finances.
Everything is financialized. Most of us can’t even understand the
intricacies. One of the things I’ve been reading about for years is how we
manufacture money and what that means. It’s complicated. Apparently, what it
means eventually, is that we’re all screwed. It’s like global warming. The
use of fossil fuels is killing us. So, for that matter, is raising cattle so
we can consume all that meat. The raising of cattle produces even more CO2
than the fossil fuels. But all those corporations are making money and
they’re officers are living well. So we’ll fight wars to keep control of oil
supplies. Oh, and by the way, fighting those wars is also bad for the
environment. So people can be wealthy and live high on the hog now, and to
hell with the future. My point is that talking about economic systems and
saying that our “mixed” economy works better than a “planned” economy, makes
no sense to me. It depends on what you mean by “works better”. And the other
thing is that when you say that, are you actually talking about the economy,
or are you thinking about particular autocratic governments that had, what
you define as”a planned economy”? Just suppose, if Cuba had been treated as
a friendly country after its revolution, if it had been left alone and had
set up a socialist economic system, if the US had had normal economic
relations with it, that planned economy might have done really well. Castro
would not have had to be as authoritarian because he wouldn’t have been
under threat of US invasion or his own assassination. It’s hard to know what
a real socialist economy in a truly democratic country would be like because
the western nations have never permitted such a thing to exist.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 10:28 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
It is a mixed economy. That is, certain aspects are planned, but certain
aspects are not.
If you believe our economy is anything like the kind of planned economy
Roger is talking about, I think you are not understanding what he means by
that.
Nobody is sitting in some central ministry somewhere and deciding how many
boxes of cereal should be produced.
Nobody is sitting in some central ministry somewhere and deciding how many
cars should be produced.
I could go on with a few million more examples, but I think it is clear
enough.
Our economy is not planned in anything like the way Roger is thinking of.
Evan
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 10:14 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Evan,
From everything I read, we have a planned economy. It is planned and
structured to benefit the wealthy. Just read a bit about how the IMF deals
with developing countries. Look at our tax structure. Look at how the
international banking system works. Think about all those meetings like the
G 7, G 20, Davos, etc. Look at the world population or even, just at the US
population, at the percentage of people whose health, housing, nutritional,
and educational needs are met. The economic inequality isn’t accidental.
The fact that you feel that you are part of a sector of humanity whose needs
are met, doesn’t mean that our economic system is working properly or that
it is unplanned.
Miriam
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 9:27 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
So far at least, despite all of its shortcomings, and there are many, the
unplanned economy has done quite a lot better than any planned ones I’ve
heard about.
Perhaps, at some future date, with sufficiently powerful computers, a
planned economy might work. But I would have a hard time trusting the people
in charge of the computers doing the planning.
Evan
From: Roger Loran Bailey (Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 8:53 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Would communism work with computers?
Well, I don't think this author quite understands what Marx was all about
and he really goes wrong when he equates Stalinism with communism as if
there is no other choice, but he still hits on a few things that can be
agreed on. I have answered you claims that communism could not work by
pointing out that for the majority of time that humans existed it was the
only economic model, but primitive communism is still not something that we
would want to return to. Even though prehistoric people participated in a
communist economy they didn't know it. They had no concept of economy and
one thing they did not do was plan their economy unless you count something
like storing up food for the winter. Capitalism is not a planned economy
either. Oh, the federal reserve may fiddle with the interest rates or tax
policy may be changed with claims of definite effects, but the real effects
are not even close to the effects claimed in the rhetoric. What we need is
an economy planned with human needs in mind and without profit as a motive.
Marx, lenin and others have had a lot to say about how that should be done,
but it is unquestionable that they did not have computers. Computers have
become a lot more powerful than they used to be and are becoming even more
powerful. In the past economic planners could use pencil and paper to make
calculations and then came adding machines and then came computers which are
primitive by today's standards. By the way, I remember reading a book from
the NLS called Stonehenge Explained. Without digressing too much into what
it was all about I will just say that the author used what he considered an
extremely advanced computer to make calculations about the rocks that make
up Stonehenge. He raved about that computer that he used in the early
sixties that took up a whole building and that he had to apply for time on
and had to wait for months. Most of us now have home desktop computers that
are many times more powerful than that one. So when doing economic planning
we really should take advantage of whatever tools that we have available to
us and I am sure that these computers can make that planning many times more
efficient than Marx or Lenin ever imagined. One of Lenin's more famous
quotations was, "Soviet power and electrification equals communism." I doubt
that he literally believed that. It was more of a political slogan meant to
emphasize the importance of bringing electricity to the Russian people. And,
like I said, Russia was something of a backward country at the time of the
revolution. There were very many areas where no one had ever seen a light
bulb and bringing electricity to the masses was a high priority. That has
been mostly accomplished. I suppose there might still be s few outposts in
the backwoods of the Russian territory that still don't have electricity,
but that would be very rare. The essential technology now is the computer.
It just could be that a world soviet power combined with the use of
computers for an economy that would be geared toward human needs rather than
profit would equal communism.
_________________________________________________________________ Isaac
Asimov “Don't you believe in flying saucers, they ask me? Don't you believe
in telepathy? — in ancient astronauts? — in the Bermuda triangle? — in life
after death?No, I reply. No, no, no, no, and again no.One person recently,
goaded into desperation by the litany of unrelieved negation, burst out
"Don't you believe in anything?"Yes", I said. "I believe in evidence. I
believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent
observers. I'll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if
there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is,
however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.” ― Isaac
Asimov On 11/12/2018 10:21 PM, Evan Reese wrote:
Roger, I found this while looking for something else. It’s something I
saved and then forgot about. It’s speculative, but thought you, and perhaps
others here, might find some interest in it.
Evan
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122568/what-if-stalin-had-computers
What If Stalin Had Computers?
A new book contemplates the end of capitalism (again)—it's a nice story,
but a terrible plan
By Malcolm Harris @bigmeaninternet
When will capitalism end? It’s not a new idea, and even the capitalists
suspect it will happen. After all, every other mode of production has
fallen, and capitalism isn’t a steady-state system. It simply isn’t built to
stay the same. As firms incorporate new technologies, capacity increases
per-capita, and jobs change, so too does the nature of commodities and
consumption. It happened with the assembly line, and it’s happening again
with information technology. In 1930, John Maynard Keynes famously predicted
these trends would reduce everyone’s daily toil to part-time by now, while
Karl Marx thought the same developments would compel workers to seize the
whole system and abolish wage-labor in general. But the system still lives.
If the history of postcapitalism so far is a repeating chorus asking
“Are we there yet?”, then the new book from Channel 4 economics editor Paul
Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, is a reassuring “Almost!” from
the front seat. Like a good co-pilot, Mason keeps his eyes on his
indicators, and he has the end in sight. Or at least on his graphs. How the
transition might occur is less important than that it must.
Marxist economics is not a vibrant field within the anglophone academy
or public sphere. Even Thomas Piketty’s best selling import, Capital in the
Twenty-First Century, didn’t take much more than a good title from the
communists. Mason is an oddity, as an economics commentator of some stature
(at least in the UK, where he has been an economics/business editor since
2001) who believes that labor is the source of all value. He spends much of
the first half of Postcapitalismredeeming the work of heterodox Soviet
economist Nikolai Kondtratieff, whose model of 50-year four-phase market
cycles is Mason’s preferred historical gauge.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Kondtratieff wave explanation is an intuitive way to look at 200
years of economic history: In Mason’s telling, industrial capitalism has
completed four cycles since 1790, driven by the interrelated processes of
technological innovation, global expansion, capital investment, and not
least by labor struggles. The story a cycle goes more or less like this:
Capitalists incorporate new productive technology, sharing the proceeds with
workers; profits slow and workers fight with their bosses as firms try to
depress labor costs; when capitalists can’t find any more savings, they’re
forced to incorporate new technology and start the cycle over. Despite its
Soviet origins, mainstream British and American economists have found the
model useful for describing how capitalism manages to persist.
The problem is we seem to have broken the cycle. Where workers should
have been able to leverage their power for higher living standards, capital
instead outsourced production, smashed unions, captured the regulators, and
expanded money supply by unpegging the dollar from gold. Mason calls this
counter-cyclical move “neoliberalism,” and it’s a helpful definition for a
term sometimes used carelessly to refer to anything bad and capitalist.
Kondratieff described a dance between capital and labor that was
theoretically sustainable—a heresy that did not go over well with Stalin,
who felt that the proletariat was only days from halting the waltz.
As it turned out, Stalin was wrong and capital broke up with labor, not
the other way around. Mason calls our current situation the “long, disrupted
wave”: The lights are on, and Kondratieff’s dance is over. This isn’t the
only relationship that’s broken; capitalist economics is incompatible with
information technology, Mason claims. As the supply of some commodities
(like music files) becomes infinite, price-setting becomes arbitrary and
unsustainable. How do you measure the amount of labor in replicable file?
The adaptable system of production that Kondratieff saw from the other side
is sinking. “The most highly educated generation in the history of the human
race, and the best connected,” Mason writes, “will not accept a future of
high inequality and stagnant growth.”
Postcapitalism really begins here, at the bargaining table with capital
and labor looking for a plan that will settle their differences once and for
all. If the world is headed for imminent ecological collapse, then to
continue on with our current capitalist mode of production is suicide.
Maximizing actors don’t kill themselves, so the operative question is what
to do next. How can we maintain people’s standards of living while
socializing production, reducing labor, saving the environment, and making
the best use of new technology? Mason has some ideas.
The book really comes into its own when Mason addresses the
possibilities of contemporary planning. He does not go as far as to endorse
“cyber Stalinism” but at the very least poses its thesis: What if the
problem with the Soviet Union was that it was too early? What if our
computer processing power and behavioral data are developed enough now that
central planning could outperform the market when it comes to the
distribution of goods and services?
If you raised your hand and said this in an American ECON100 class,
you’d be laughed out of the room, so Mason as prominent public employee
deserves a lot of credit for bringing it this far into the English-speaking
mainstream. The possible socialized uses of technology is an exciting can of
worms. Using large sets of behavior and population data, capitalist firms
like Amazon and Google have developed predictive capacities that would make
Soviet cyberneticians weep with joy. Capitalism says that the best use of
this capacity is to sell people stuff, but parts of this process are so
socially unproductive and unnecessary—we don’t just have clickbait sites, we
have third-rate clickbait sites—that it can’t possibly be the case.
“Imagine if Walmart or Tesco were prepared to publish their customer
data (suitably anonymized) for free,” Mason writes. “Society would benefit:
everybody from farmers to epidemiologists could mine the data, and make more
accurate decisions.” This is just the beginning; remaking productive
machinery in the collective interest means driving necessary labor down as
far as possible with data analytics and self-management. Why can’t a
meatpacking factory function like a web startup, with room for autonomy and
achievement targets instead of required hours? It’s fun to imagine how we
could do better than capitalism if we all decided to, especially if no one
had to worry about creating and maintaining false scarcity around info-tech
goods.
The best existing example I can think of for the kind of efficiencies
Mason predicts is the difference between Netflix and Popcorn Time. Netflix
is, of course, the $28 billion media streaming company with over 2000
employees. Popcorn Time is a legally shady alternative that streams media
torrents over a clean ad-less interface. It’s a functional and free
alternative, what economists would call a replacement good. Popcorn Time
makes no money, and has a staff of 20 around the world who volunteer their
labor part-time. Netflix is (as a streaming company) a near-total waste of
time. Those 2000-plus workers could be developing a nutritious Slurpee and
designing a distribution infrastructure. Or babysitting. Hell, they could be
lowering the collective labor burden enough so everyone has time to
masturbate one extra time a year, and it would still be more socially useful
than charging rent for access to digital content.
In Mason’s telling, postcapitalism involves an abundance of resources,
including free time. Without capitalism’s wastefulness, we can refashion the
world to allow human potential and creativity to blossom. It’s an enjoyable
thought experiment, but capitalists are not looking to make a deal. Given
the choice, I have no doubt that the ownership class will literally abandon
the planet Earth before they surrender capitalism. Bosses no longer
negotiate with organized labor if they can avoid it; they’d rather make a
blanket offer to all workers as individuals: Work and/or starve. Violence
and coercion don’t play much of a role in Postcapitalism, but that’s not
true of capitalism. Huge, advanced police forces ensure this is the deal
whether people “accept” it (as Mason says) or not.
Imaginative as it is, Postcapitalism is not a revolutionary book. As
Malcolm X observed very clearly of revolution after revolution: “What was it
for? Land! How did they get it? Bloodshed!” Capitalists understand this
principle very well, and their state proxies are well-armed. The vanguard
movements of postcapitalism that Mason identifies—the global occupy
sequence, Brazilian World Cup protesters, fracking blockaders—have all been
forced out of whatever territory they were able to take temporarily, and
that’s with the authorities exercising significant restraint relative to
their capabilities. Since postcapitalism doesn’t detail the “How?”, it
doesn’t have to answer “How do we kill that many cops?”
There’s a reason Marxists—even heterodox ones—don’t usually speculate on
how to arrange communism: Marx says not to. “Communism is for us not a state
of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have
to adjust itself,” he writes with Engels in The German Ideology. “We call
communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”
Not even Marx claimed to know what communism will look like, but he knew it
would have to destroy capitalism first.
It’s hard to follow Marx into his beautifully hopeful “will have been”
idea of history without thinking he’s doing some sword-in-the-stone
prophecy, but he nonetheless reveals important problems with postcapitalism.
I cannot imagine the real movement that could, in retrospect, validate
Mason’s version of history. The true qualities of capitalism, including the
weak points where it finally fails, will only be visible in the shadow of
whatever social force destroys it. The people Mason describes, at least as
motivated and defined by the historical factors he describes (education,
connection, stagnant wages), do not seem willing or able to confront the
system at the necessary scale or with the required intensity. To borrow a
perspective from Marx, I do not believe Mason’s theory of capitalism will
have been the case.
The true story of capitalism, like all social forms, will be written in
its ashes. Until then, a theory of historical necessity and a couple bucks
will get you a cup of coffee. Mason criticizes leftists for being against
things that exist instead of for things that could be, but the position of
the cart in relation to the horse isn’t up for sensible debate.
Postcapitalism is still one revolution away.
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